Leica Oskar Barnack Award meets Leica Gallery Frankfurt Archive

August 8, 2022 - September 17, 2022

Leica Oskar Barnack Award photographers Tom Hegen (finalist 2021), Mustafah Abdulaziz (winner 2019) and Narelle Autio (winner 2002) meet works from the Leica Frankfurt Archive (Kai Pfaffenbach, Ulrich Mack, Patrick Trefz and Régis Bossu).

The series of the LOBA finalists:

Narelle Autio - The Coastal Dwellers

Saturated colours, intense light, happy people, blue seas, clouds: the Australian photographer won the 2002 LOBA for her lively picture series dedicated to beach life. Her complex compositions represent a great homage to the beauty of the Australian coastal landscape and convinced the jury, with their content and form, that the series best captured the competition’s theme of humanity’s relationship with the environment.

Tom Hegen - Coal Mining Germany


The German aerial photographer produced this series, dedicated to the largest brown coal district in the east of Germany, last year. Taken from on high, Hegen’s pictures reveal the surprising beauty, brilliant colours and fascinating symmetry of the desolate landscape. From this perspective, both the devastating consequences to the countryside and the complex relationship between humanity and the environment are brought into sharp focus.

Mustafah Abdulaziz - Water

With his epic long-term project, “Water”, Mustafah Abdulaziz, winner of the 2019 Leica Oskar Barnack Award, is underlining his understanding of photography. He has packed this universal theme into powerful imagery, producing a visual commentary on the relationship between humanity and the environment.
As he considers the different facets of our relationship to nature and the planet, the visual approach Abdulaziz uses for his photo essay is naturalistic and documentary, while also exploring metaphor. All the motifs in the cycle confirm the fact that without water there can be no life.